Monochromies

Monochromies is a musical and visual meditation on the notion of color, composed for Virus TI, details below:

The idea of monochrome is very often associated to a single color considered in itself as the substance of a painting, since Yves Klein invented his famous blue and used it constantly in reference to cosmos and alchemy. But this conception is not aware that a genuine monochrome is far more than a unique tone and Yves Klein who was initiated to the secrets of color as well as alchemy perfectly knew it. Behind the visible radiance of a his symbolical atmospheric blue, all the dimensions of the spectrum are gathered in a composition of their different values, forming the specific vibration of the cosmic substance this artist invented. Such a strange phenomenon is not only poetry or the sign of an ancient belief conveyed into a kind of painter’s mysticism, but also a physical reality. Every color radiates through the others and produces the specific aura of each of them. As an alchemist wrote about the philosophical stone ” It has every color, white, red, yellow, blue sky, green”, is also true in the filed of music since colors and sounds are two expressions of the same basic reality. In this piece, I try to explore it by a combination of music and visual events, divided into four moments, each one corresponding to an element, but also according to a process in three dimensions plus one (space and time, sides of the triangle and their blossom in a final fourth absolute form in which the distinct lines and angles finally unite. These different moments are also successive enters into the core of the universe mystery through musical and visual doors (this is why I used the noise of a genuine door in the third enter, in association with the sounds of the Virus TI, from 6:27 to 7:52). Each door leads to a deeper vision until the piece reaches its end in the suspension of the enigma, close to its revelation, but a few steps before it since we can just go on the border but never cross it. The only knowledge we are allowed to reach being the intuition of the other side through our journey of impossible discovery.
Film and music by Marc-Henri Arfeux